Maybe Daryl Hall Hates the ‘Yacht Rock’ Guys Because They Said He’s Nyacht Rock
Pop rock, adult contemporary and blue-eyed soul legend Daryl Hall will throw a fit if you ever call his music “yacht rock” — as if he could ever be that smooth.
In 2005, J.D. Ryznar, Hunter D. Stair and Lane Farnham debuted the first episode of their mockumentary video series Yacht Rock at Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab’s short-film festival Channel 101, unaware that they were about to recontextualize a decades-old movement in popular music forever. Yacht Rock told the comedically dramatized stories behind the biggest artists and smoothest hits of the “West Coast sound” era, as it was previously known, back when kings like Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald blended soft rock, R&B, soul, jazz and about a half-dozen other genres into a new form of relaxing music.
As the series title suggests, Ryznar, Stair, Farnham and their collaborators dubbed this sailor-friendly sound “Yacht Rock.”
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Despite running for just 12 episodes on YouTube between 2005 and 2010, Yacht Rock revived interest in an oft-mocked and comically misbranded period in music history and caused a resurgence in the careers of many of the artists depicted in the series. Late last year, the widely watched HBO original Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary acknowledged the influence that the web series had on the recent yacht rock renaissance, but many of the musicians featured in the retrospective still had mixed feelings about the label and its origins.
Then, there’s Hall, one-half of Hall & Oates, whose opinion of Ryznar, Stair, Farnham and the rest of the Yacht Rock crew is clear and uncomplicated. “Yacht rock was a fucking joke by two jerk-offs in California, and suddenly it became a genre,” Hall said on a recent episode of the Broken Record podcast.
To which loyal listeners of the Beyond Yacht Rock podcast might retort, “Yacht rock is nyacht a joke, and Hall is nyacht yacht.”
“I don’t even understand it. I never understood it,” Hall ranted about the yacht rock label that he mistakenly believes a bunch of California comedians foisted upon him and his work. “It’s just R&B with maybe some jazz in there. It’s mellow R&B. It’s smooth R&B. I don’t see what the yacht part is.”
Well, Hall, it’s the part that you’re not, if the Yacht Rock jerk-offs are to be believed.
In 2016, Ryznar, Stair, Yacht Rock host “Hollywood” Steve Huey and co-producer David B. Lyons started the Beyond Yacht Rock podcast to continue inventing new categorizations for specific styles of music and to further define the first genre that they created post-facto. Frustrated by the overuse of the label that they invented, Beyond Yacht Rock sought to create criteria upon which music could be deemed as “Yacht or Nyacht," and over the five-year recording run of Beyond Yacht Rock, the group graded literal hundreds of songs on the “Yachtski” scale to mathematically determine their yachtness. Beyond Yacht Rock assigned each track a Yachtski score between 1-100, with 50 being the cut-off between Yacht and Nyacht.
The cultural critics of Beyond Yacht Rock believe that the crucial elements of yacht rock include high production value, electric piano, jazz and R&B influences, the use of the word “fool” and an upbeat rhythm that they call the “Doobie Bounce,” named, of course, after the highly-rated Doobie Brothers. Basically, if it sounds like Michael McDonald’s music, or if it is Michael McDonald’s music, it’s yacht rock.
By these criteria, the most yacht rock song of all time is the Doobie Brothers hit single “What A Fool Believes.” And, according to Beyond Yacht Rock, Hall & Oates only ever recorded two songs that could be considered fringe yacht rock: “Kiss on My List” and “Time’s Up (Alone Tonight).” The 13 other Hall & Oates songs that Beyond Yacht Rock graded fell below the 50 mark on the Yachtski scale, cementing their place in the nyacht column.
So while Steely Dan frontman Donald Fagen may have had some justification for cursing out the producers of Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary when they called to ask about the hermetically guarded genre — Steely Dan has 28 songs certified as “yacht” — Hall must have been dreaming when he thought that he had earned the title of “yacht rocker.” With those Yachtski scores, nobody’s making Hall’s dream come true.
